Staff Comes Together for Professional Development & Fun

The first meeting of the Crochet and Knitting Club at Ferndale High School took place this week. Students of all skill levels came together to explore fiber arts. The club is open to all students and has the goal of eventually creating pieces to be donated to charity organizations in our community.

This week in Room 10, the Little Eagles have been reading the fairy tale "The Three Little Pigs." Storytime is accompanied by activities to build listening and comprehension skills. The preschoolers built their own straw, stick, or brick house and pretended to be the Big Bad Wolf to see if they could blow their house down. Students also used straws to "huff and puff" the paint (blowing through a straw) to move their paint around on the paper. Listening to and comprehending spoken and written words are essential aspects of learning, and students demonstrated their ability to pick up individual story elements, such as a character and interactions among characters as well as the sequence between events.

Today, we celebrated Classgiving—an annual tradition that allows Adult Transition students to contribute something extra to their school family. With some support from Adult Transitions Teacher Danny Collins and Joe Altizer, the students shop for all of the ingredients, cook the food for the feast, and serve it to friends and classmates. This tradition is over 10 years old, and we are so proud of our Self Contained students for putting this event on every year.

At Monday's Board of Education Meeting, Director Heidi Schmidt shared an update on the progress towards Strategic Plan goals at FECC along with fun and exciting things on the horizon, such as the Young Athletes Special Olympics program in partnership with Life Lab of Ferndale. One point she focused on was the importance of novelty in an early childhood classroom to capture attention, create interest and activate essential learning behavior. FECC has created an ever growing Materials Lending Library to support teachers in being able to routinely provide new and engaging experiences within their classrooms. Staff are able to request any of the items to borrow for use in their classrooms as a way to enhance, extend, and challenge student thinking.

Mrs. Schmidt was joined by Ms. Shelby Martin, Lead Teacher in a tuition-based classroom, who shared how she accesses the lending library often to increase student engagement and learning. Prior to inviting members of the Board to play with her and a few of her students' new classroom toy, she shared what STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) looks like in a preschool classroom. All in a day's play, students at FECC are involved in data analysis, experimenting, predicting, drawing conclusions, counting, measurement and problem solving. One of the most novel items in Ms. Shelby's class is Air Toobz (https://shorturl.at/pNVWZ).

Members of the Board got a front row seat to observe and participate in the STEM learning that items like this provide in the early childhood classroom. In these ten minutes alone, the students were seen experimenting, problem-solving, working together, making predictions, using spatial reasoning, making comparisons and most importantly, having fun while learning through play.

Students from FHS, UHS, and TCEC attended the Southeast MiCareer Quest event last Tuesday held annually at Suburban Showplace in Novi. Employers and training institutions from around Michigan provided students with hands on experiences in four career quadrants including Advanced Manufacturing, Healthcare, Construction and Information Technology. Students tried out new technology, asked questions and participated in computerized and VR simulations. Students learned about possible career pathways and opportunities in their areas of interest.